Foreign Entanglements: Remote Warfare
On this week’s episode of Foreign Entanglements, Walter White spoke with Jesse Pinkman about drones, Ender’s Game, and video games:
Author Page for Robert Farley
No Cruz-Paul ’16?
Photo via Christian Post. http://www.christianpost.com/news/hundreds-of-iowa-pastors-pray-for-born-again-christian-presidential-hopefuls-ted-cruz-rand-paul-100594/
Senator Ted Cruz calls his colleague Rand Paul a “good friend.” The two men are the stars of the Tea Party movement, propelled to Washington by activist fervor and allied in their effort to restrain the reach of the federal government.
Right from the start
You were a thief
You stole my heart
And I your willing victim
I let you see the parts of me
That weren’t all that pretty
And with every touch you fixed them
But when Mr. Cruz went to New York City to meet with donors this summer, he privately offered a different view of Mr. Paul: The Kentucky senator can never be elected president, he told them, because he can never fully detach himself from the strident libertarianism of his father, former Representative Ron Paul of Texas.
Now you’ve been talking in your sleep, oh, oh
Things you never say to me, oh, oh
Tell me that you’ve had enough
Of our love, our love
Word of Mr. Cruz’s remarks reached Mr. Paul’s inner circle, touching off anger and resentment.
And the incident further inflamed a rivalry that has been quietly building as the Republican Party tries to grapple with the force and power of its Tea Party wing. Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Paul harbor presidential ambitions and view themselves as representing a new, more energized movement of Republican activists. But they are pursuing distinctly different paths as they try to rise, diverging not just in style but in their approach to intraparty politics.
Just give me a reason
Just a little bit’s enough
Just a second we’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
It’s in the stars
It’s been written in the scars on our hearts
We’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
Mr. Cruz and his aides believe he is uniquely suited to galvanize conservatives, pointing to his leadership of the effort to cut off funding for the Affordable Care Act — confrontational, pugnacious, disdainful of President Obama. Mr. Cruz, 42 — a Texan, a born-again Baptist and son of an evangelical preacher — also connects naturally with Christian conservatives, many of whom have become foot soldiers in the Tea Party and view Mr. Paul as too unorthodox on social issues.
Mr. Paul’s inner circle privately derides Mr. Cruz as “the chief of the wacko birds,” echoing a phrase from Senator John McCain of Arizona. And, while allowing Mr. Cruz to lead the charge on Obamacare, the Kentucky senator has quietly been reaching out to more establishment forces within the Republican Party, trying to prove to big donors and mainline Republican organizations that he is more than a Tea Party figure or a rerun of his father’s failed candidacies.
I’m sorry I don’t understand
Where all of this is coming from
I thought that we were fine
(Oh, we had everything)
Your head is running wild again
My dear we still have everythin’
And it’s all in your mind
(Yeah, but this is happenin’)
The divergent strategies undertaken by Mr. Cruz and Mr. Paul not only put them on a collision course should they both pursue presidential candidacies. They also could help determine whether the Tea Party — right now a muscular and rebellious force within the Republican Party — remains at war with the establishment or is eventually more smoothly integrated into the party apparatus.
Mr. Paul and those close to him are confident that his die-hard libertarian-leaning supporters will not desert him, and that gives him freedom to build bridges beyond that base.
“He’s becoming a translator between the grass-roots conservatives and the establishment,” said Trygve Olson, a consultant who bridges the two wings. He then added an implicit dig at other Republicans: “He’s actually demonstrating leadership.”
You’ve been havin’ real bad dreams, oh, oh
You used to lie so close to me, oh, oh
There’s nothing more than empty sheets
Between our love, our love
Oh, our love, our love
The standoff over health care and the shutdown also highlighted the personal differences between the two men and how they are viewed within the Senate: Mr. Paul is more easygoing and speaks casually as he makes his points with fellow senators. Mr. Cruz, his colleagues complain, often seems like he is lecturing them — or, as one put it, “still on Hannity’s show.” While Mr. Paul was overheard on a hot mike plotting strategy with Mr. McConnell, Mr. Cruz was receiving tongue-lashings from his Republican colleagues at private senators-only luncheons. Mr. Paul mixes with a range of senators at the weekly Republican luncheons; Mr. Cruz tends to stick close to his fellow hard-liner Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
Nowhere is the competition between the men more obvious than in the crucial state of Iowa, where Mr. Paul was the most sought-after speaker in the state earlier this year in the aftermath of his filibuster over the use of drone strikes, but where Mr. Cruz is now surging after his starring role in the shutdown battle. He was the headline speaker at the Iowa Republican Party dinner late last month.
Just give me a reason
Just a little bit’s enough
Just a second we’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
I never stopped
You’re still written in the scars on my heart
You’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
Both appeared at a gathering of pastors in Des Moines this summer and spoke at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter summit meeting last month in Washington. The day before that meeting, they addressed a private meeting of a few dozen of the country’s leading Christian conservatives. Attendees said that Mr. Cruz, who was joined at the closed-door meeting by his pastor father, had the more compelling presence, but that Mr. Paul’s wife, Kelley, impressed the group by “talking in our kind of language,” as one participant put it.
Mr. Paul clearly has more to prove than Mr. Cruz among evangelicals, who remember his father’s libertarianism and are suspicious of his positions, like his support for reducing sentences on drug users and allowing the states to decide whether to legalize same-sex marriage.
Oh, tear ducts can rust
I’ll fix it for us
We’re collecting dust
But our love’s enough
You’re holding it in
You’re pouring a drink
No nothing is as bad as it seems
We’ll come clean
Mr. Paul and his advisers are acutely aware of such unease and are taking steps to address it. Most telling, perhaps was an exchange involving Mr. Paul, who was raised an Episcopalian, at the end of a pastors’ luncheon in May in Cedar Rapids.
“One of the pastors said to Rand, ‘We’ve beat all around this, I don’t want to beat all around this anymore, let’s be real specific: Would you define yourself as born again?’ ” recalled David Lane, a Christian conservative organizer. “He said, ‘I’m born again.’ ”
Still, Mr. Lane underscored the advantage Mr. Cruz has with some evangelicals. Asked about the Texas senator’s faith, he responded, “Cruz is obviously born again and goes to First Baptist Houston.”
Just give me a reason
Just a little bit’s enough
Just a second we’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
It’s in the stars
It’s been written in the scars on our hearts
That we’re not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
October of Broken Dreams
The LGM archive of October 2004 amounts to a grim tale of woe, punctuated by busted predictions, forlorn hopes, and dawdling over irrelevancies.
Re-posting the first few days of November 2004 is going to be a struggle.
China, IP, and Innovation
In this week’s Diplomat column, I muse a bit on China, technological innovation, and IP law:
A recent report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) gives some advice with respect to retaining America’s technological advantage in an era of disruptive technological innovation and diffusion. The authors, like Huang, worry that the U.S. government is not making sufficient investments in technologies with great potential, such as directed energy weapons, advanced unmanned aerial vehicles, and human modification. The report paints a grim picture, suggesting that the consequence of falling behind in any or all of these technologies could be the unsettling of the existing Pacific balance of power.
Unfortunately, the report fails to mention the legal environment in which scientists and engineers pursue technological innovation.
Airpower Movie of the Week: Sky Fighters
Ever imagine what Top Gun could have been if Iceman were the hero and everybody was Chinese? Find out tonight when we screen Sky Fighters, a 2011 knockoff of the 1986 sexy beach volleyball classic. If Kyle Mizokami’s review doesn’t make you want to watch this movie, nothing will. We’ll be starting tonight at 9pm EDT, hashtag #airmovie. I’ll be tweeting from the GroundedUSAF account. The film is available from several sources, but I’ll probably be watching on Youtube:
Space?
You can find the latest edition of the Grounded argument over at Medium: War is Boring:
And so, in effect, we argue that the conflation of air and space is wrong; when properly conceived of as a commons, space is more like the sea than like the air. Military culture structures how an organization envisions its role, and its relationship with other organizations, and the cooperative, commerce oriented framework in which the Navy conceives of the commons makes more sense in application to space than the Air Force’s militaristic “dominance” approach.
Moving from the abstract to the concrete, the organizational assets that currently find a home in the Air Force can easily be shifted to the Navy. We won’t miss the Air Force; indeed, our space policy may improve in its absence.
Essentially, the argument combines the work of Alex Vacca with some of the more interesting stuff on maintenance of the commons. While space has effectively defaulted to the Air Force (one of the first questions I get is “What about space?”), when we think about how the services approach the commons, it turns out that the Navy’s way of thinking makes more sense than the USAF’s approach. My co-author (Max Lord, a student of mine), put the argument together in a term paper at the end of last year; this is the distillation of the case.
See also an argument that we should create a “Coast Guard” for space, and this account of the role played by the escort carrier USS Croatan in space exploration.
Wednesday Morning Linkage
To help start off your Wednesday right…
- Fantastic multi-media article on the South China Sea.
- How court decisions affect national security practice.
- This seems a trifle ambitious for South Korea.
- The next step for AirSea Battle.
- The chances that this plane will come in on budget are somewhere south of zero.
- Then again, if anyone would ever have pegged a project likely to go way over budget, it would have been the DDG-1000, and it’s actually turned out ok.
- Speaking of under budget, Grounded is now available for the special Bicentennial celebration price of $19.76! Remember, the Air Force is unconstitutional…
Repudiate! Refudiate!
Via Mr. Bogg, Conor Friedersdorf is very concerned about the future of the Democratic Party.
During President George W. Bush’s tenure, most Republicans felt that criticizing him would just help Democrats. Only the end of his presidency freed them to see its flaws clearly. Staunch conservatives who voted for him twice suddenly found themselves swept up in a Tea Party rebellion against his team’s approach to governing. They felt chagrin at the ways he had transgressed against their values, and they resolved to change the GOP so that the same mistakes would never recur.
Will some Democrats behave similarly when President Obama leaves office? Right now, most feel that criticizing the White House can only help House Republicans. But one day soon they’ll be able to look back at Obama’s two terms with clearer eyes. How many will feel chagrin at policies that transgressed against their values? How many will pressure their party’s establishment to change?
We may start finding out during the Election 2016 primaries….
Hillary Clinton is poised to be the candidate of continuity. Like Bush and Obama, she would govern as an executive-power extremist, is implicated in the civil-liberties transgressions of recent years, and would almost certainly seek to expand rather than rein in post-9/11 powers given to the national-security state.
Will she be acceptable to liberals and progressives?
What’s missing here seems to be an understanding of how the 2008 Republican primary actually played out. To my recollection, the only candidate that ran on an explicit repudiation of Bush administration security and economic policies maxed out at 24.57% of the vote in the meaningless Montana caucus, and averaged well below 10% for the bulk of the campaign despite his aforementioned monopolization of the anti-Bush position. And in 2012, that same candidate rocked all the way to an average of 11% of the GOP primary vote, despite again monopolizing the “repudiate Bush” position. And so, if Democrats in 2016 repudiate Obama to exactly the same extent that Republicans in 2008 repudiated Bush, they’ll likely select… wait for it… a candidate who supports policies that are virtually indistinguishable from the incumbent President.
Perhaps more importantly, the Tea Party reaction, such that it has been, was only incidentally about Bush, and entirely about Barack Obama. I know it bothers Conor to think about his political allies as neo-confederate fanatics largely animated by racial animus, but you go to war with the friends you choose, not the friends you… uh, choose, I guess. And of course, you can tell how much Republicans hate George W. Bush based on the 84-15 majority that thinks he was a good President.
I’ve said it before and (sadly) I suspect I’ll have to say it again: I can appreciate why Conor Friedersdorf takes himself very seriously, but I can’t understand why any progressives take him seriously at all.
Mirror Imaging?
From the Lowry-Ponnuru summation of the debt ceiling/shutdown fight:
It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic — raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom — and treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal. Adherents of this brand of conservative politics are investing considerable time, energy, and money in it, locking themselves in unending intra-party battle.
It’s an interesting passage because it makes me think of intra-progressive divides, and how similar differences play out within (what amounts to) the progressive coalition. Some of the same dynamics apply; fire focused on other progressives as much as conservatives (turns out the hippies can also throw a punch), satisfaction taken in complete loss on supposed principle, dismissal of avoidance of worst outcomes, etc. The biggest difference seems to be that left-progressives (or whatever other term you prefer), either lack the strength and interest to take control of any institutional veto points, have been shut out, or (most likely) some combination of the two.
Thoughts?
One by One, Our Old Friends Are Gone…
Abu Muqawama closes up shop. Six and a half years is forever in blog time.
On a separate issue, last night’s Airpower Movie of the Week simul-tweet was a rousing success, at least by the modest metrics I established for the event (stayed awake, made it to the end of the movie). Any ideas for next week?
And Now for Something Different
Tonight, several comrades and I are going to “simul-tweet” an airpower film. The project is a touch more complicated than it sounds, but effectively it boils down to selecting a film, selecting a time to press “play” simultaneously, and then tweeting under the hashtag #airmovie.
Tonight’s film will be the Battle of Britain (available on Netflix Instant), a star-studded 1969 extravaganza with a series of surprising twists and a shocking ending. No spoilers, please! We will be starting at 9:30pm EDT. Anyone is welcome to join; I will be tweeting under the @GroundedUSAF handle. If it works out, we may try Firefox next weekend.
“It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him …”
In the movie, Vincent despairs to drug dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz) that some “dickless piece of shit” keyed his car, but we never find out who did the deed. The screenplay, which contains (as most do) scenes that didn’t make the final cut, suggests an answer: it describes Vincent arriving in his Malibu at the strip club for his meeting with Marsellus, and parking it right next to Butch and Fabienne’s Honda — raising the possibility that the car was keyed by Butch (with whom Vincent would have just had the “you ain’t my friend, palooka” confrontation).
Funniest thing; I was thinking just yesterday about the mysterious key-er, for reasons that I can’t recall. Of course, in the final cut it’s not at all clear that Vincent drives the Malibu to the club, as he and Jules enter together after (I had presumed) a cab ride from Hawthorne Grill, but I suppose that they might have taken the cab to Vincent’s place to pick up his car. Of course, that makes it unclear why he’s still dressed in Jimmie’s clothes, but maybe they were in a hurry…
